Jetée

vNES

I'm not sure if any of you have heard of this site, but I just retrieved one of mental notes to share this, now perhaps three years after I first stumbled across the website. Sorry about that; better now than never, I guess. For the old school gamer, vNES is a repository and treasured compendium of hundreds of emulated Gameboy, Nintendo, & Super Nintendo games that you can play at your whim through your browser. It doesn't matter if you are hardcore player, a bright-eyed newcomer, or if you are just trying to recapture that youthful exuberance you once felt playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, James Bond Jr., or Mario Is Missing!, I'm sure you'll find a game that'll entertain you on your coffee break.

**Jet is currently side-scrolling and taking names playing Shatterhand**

For those that wish to know more, here is the service's official aim:

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

squeeeb

this is fantastic!!!!!!!!!! brings back wonderful memories of days spent in dark loud arcades, sounds of popping and whizzing and beeping and buzzing. good times, and great fun. thanks Jetee!

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onward to mayhem!

The_Jazz

Ah, Tecmo Bowl. How I've missed you...

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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Wrexify

Uh oh, what's that sound? My productivity quickly going out the window? Yes, I do believe so.

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"Nitwit! Oddment! Blubber! Tweak!"

Xerxys

I have almost all these games and I just couldn't come out of my closet till today. Yes TFP, I'm a SNES, vNES, Ending Man fan.

I love them all.

MSD

It's a great site, but copyright law doesn't work the way they say it does.

Cynthetiq

great, my productivity already sucks. this is not going to improve that score at all.... maybe in Bubble Bobble.

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I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Glory's Sun

Mega Man.. fuck.yes.

buh bye production.

Jetée

I didn't think it did, but if it makes them feel "justified" for ripping licensed games and sharing them en masse, I guess it's a start, and a slightly safer alternative for the average man than downloading ROMs from shady re-directed links.

If you happen to know, what is the legitimate terms of fair use through copyright?

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

snowy

We just buy the old games ourselves for our Wii with their Virtual Console service. While their selection is limited in some ways, it has a lot of good games too, and for multiple consoles (including non-Nintendo consoles). We have Super Mario Bros. 3, Punchout!, River City Ransom, Lifeforce, and Altered Beast, among others. I'm told that many of these games were popular back in the day. Personally, I don't find it to be a big "walk down Memory Lane" thing, mostly because I didn't have a Nintendo or a Sega as a kid, but almost all of my friends do.

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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rekna

I just loaded up contra just to put in the konami code.

little_tippler

This thread is really weird because whenever I look at the site's name virtualNES, I see my name in capitals. Strange! Yes, I love myself /threadjack

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Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Fernando Pessoa, 1918

Grancey

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Quiet, mild-mannered souls might just turn out to be roaring lions of two-fisted cool.

MSD

I believe the court would hold me innocent of violation if I played games that I owned, but convict them. Fair use covers educational use, criticism, parody (think SNL,) and citation. If a student group wants to show a movie for entertainment in the auditorium, they would have to pay for a license for public screening, not for profit. If they charge admission, change it to public screening, for profit. If a professor wants to show a movie that is related to class (psych classes showing things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Cybil are common,) it's fair use.

khe1138

Ahhh, the good old days. Fortunately my SNES still works and there's a used book store that has a great selection of games that I can afford.

Glory's Sun

bump for awesomeness :P

and excite bike doesn't seem nearly as fun all these years later

Jetée

I meant to address this in the OP, but the site is indeed very akin and identifiable to the Wii's Virtual Console. It houses many classic games, some rarer ones that you'd perhaps never, ever find in your local hobby shops, and just beams the fun and enjoyability of what was once fond pasttimes of our youth.


The benefit of the site in comparison to the Virtual Console as I see it is because of the provincial nature of Nintendo of America, Inc., the company only releases games that were ported to North America as downloadables, so we know nothing of the early history of some of Nintendo's finest games, at least playability-wise; while the site vNES, on the other hand, regularly uploads and features Japanese-exclusive titles that play just as good as before, or even better, due to fansubs/translation addendums.


I love being able to take 15 minutes of downtime in the afternoon, and have the versatility provided to me to either play Super Adventure Island (a game in which I have never, ever gotten past level 3 on..) or Mother, (otherwise known as Earthbound's prequel/sequel). It's a beautiful thing.

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Glory's Sun

what was that game where the kid used a yo-yo as a weapon?? I remember spending hours on that

Jetée

I'm guessing you mean Mother's port to North America, Earthbound.

"EarthBound takes place on Earth in the year 199X. Throughout the game, four characters, known as the Chosen Four, come to compose the party in the game. They are Ness, Paula, Jeff, and Poo."





(interesting geek factoid: the main nemesis in Earthbound was an alien who threatened to invade the homely American town of Onett, among other locales in his quest for world domination. What was his name in the game? Zoda, who was also a main antagonist racer from the F-Zero series.) /end

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Cynthetiq

ummm.. you know, smoke som... oh never mind.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Glory's Sun

lol that didn't even help.

Jetee.. no that's not the one.. it was like an island adventure.. think the kid had to save his grandfather or something.. but he had a yo-yo as a weapon.

mixedmedia

My daughters thank you. All three of them.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

thespian86

Earthbound is epic; it is probably tied for best RPG of all time.

SNES, I still think, was the best system for story based gaming. Now it's about graphics and effects, then it was about superior story telling. it's when the medium became a little more advanced and had the wiggle room to create "art".

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EX: Whats new?
ME: I officially love coffee more then you now.
EX: uh...
ME: So, not much.

Glory's Sun

I found the game I was thinking of..

StarTropics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jetée

Whoa... you're right. I mistakenly took StarTropics for a combination of the gameplay of Earthbound/SuperAdventureIsland for whatever reason. That was weird. Must've been a long since I've played either of them.

From the article, and the main attribution of my previously wrong geek info:

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Reese

Awesome. They have Karnov.. I used to love to hate that game because it was too damn hard.

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“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick” - Dave Barry

essendoubleop

Agh. This is painful. I can't get any of the games to work. I click on the links and there's a big unloadable square in the middle. I think it's something wrong with Javascript but I can't figure it out.